I was reading this post by Microsoft Premier Developer’s blog, and it was a nice throwback to past times where I had to deal with these type of requests because of the existing process in place.
I also thought about how easy it became customising a process with VSTS compared to TFS, and the first thing that sprung to mind was to pair this up with the Board Styling options:
This will cause cards that are unassigned to a single individual but assigned to a group to be highlighted in the board:
There can be so may reasons why a team might choose to do this – and it does not just apply to product development. Think about situations where telemetry operators escalate events or tickets are integrated in the backlog.
Why am I focusing on such small details? Well, this is the kind of personalisation (I cannot really call them customisations 😊) that enable cross-role consumption of the stack.
It does not have to be anything extremely complicated, but whenever you can bring an existing process inside the tool in a frictionless manner you are already paving the way for a better reception and adoption of the tool itself.